The Internet is composed of hundreds of millions of websites. For a consumer of websites, in order to identify new websites or websites relevant to the consumer's interest, the consumer often uses third party sources. One of the most prevalently used third party sources is a search engine. A search engine is a tool that presents a list of web pages to a consumer based on a particular search term or phrase submitted by the consumer.
In general, a search engine has a web crawler, a ranking algorithm, and a user interface. The web crawler is a computer program that visits and gathers information from websites in an automated fashion. Specifically, the function of the web crawler is to obtain information from all websites on the Internet.
When the consumer submits search terms to the search engine, the ranking algorithm and the user interface are used. The ranking algorithm is an algorithm that decides, for a particular set of search terms, the order in which to present websites relevant to the search terms. Typically, the ranking algorithm is based on the relevancy of each web page. The user interface presents a listing of the websites in the order identified by the ranking algorithm. Specifically, for each website in the listing, the user interface presents a portion of the information gathered by the web crawler. For example, the user interface may display the title of the website with a portion of the text gathered from the website.
Websites compete for the consumer's selection of the website in the user interface of the search engine. Whether a consumer selects a particular website can be based on a number of factors, such as the information presented, the rank or position of the particular website in the listing, and the information presented by surrounding websites in the listing. In view of the factors and the automation of the search engine, a website should be optimized for the different components of the search engine. Search engine optimization is a process by which user updates the user's website to compete effectively with other websites for the consumer's selection.